SearchCap: The Day In Search, Jan. 15, 2007

Below is what happened in search today, as reported onSearch Engine Land and from other
places across the web:

From Search Engine Land:

Greg Linden
Mothballs Findory
I never got into Greg Linden’s Findory service much. Now after three years,
he’s announced the personalized information service is effectively being
mothballed. What’s there should keep working, but he has no plans to expand or
improve the service further. I may not have used Findory much, but I’ve
continued to be impressed on Greg’s thoughts on search and personalization
that he shares via his personal blog. Best of luck, Greg, on whatever you do
next….

SEO Blogs Under
Hack Attack
First Graywolf’s blog was hacked, then I just found Stuntdubl has gone down
when I was about to send some link love his way. I’ll hold that for tomorrow.
They’re not the only ones. The culprit is over here and writes (NOTE: Links no
longer work as this WordPress hosted account was promptly suspended for
violating the terms of service):…

More Spotting
Google’s Related Searches At Bottom Of Page
Last month, we reported how Google was testing related searches at the bottom
of search results pages, which Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed in comments on
our post. In the past few days, I’ve seen a flood of further posts about
related searches as more and more people spot these. Yes, they do seem to be
more noticeable and frequently appearing. I’ve been getting them myself over
the past two days. You get a series of eight suggested searches as links,
under the heading of "Searches related to:" followed by the original word you
searched for….

Googlers Give
Overwhelmingly To Democrats; Google’s PAC Gave More To Republicans
Google contributes thousands to conservatives from USA Today looks at how
while 98 percent of Google employee money went to Democrats in the last
election, the company-controlled Google NetPAC gave 61 percent of its
contributions to conservative candidates. Then again, donations of $31,000
were tiny and the "company" PAC has donations that come almost entirely from
only seven employees, hardly feeling that much like a real company effort….

Looking At
Microsoft’s Continued Long Game In Search
Hooked on Google from the San Jose Mercury News revisits a theme from
Microsoft that I’ve reported to readers over the years. That’s how Microsoft’s
failure to beat Google in search — despite millions in spending — gets the
"it’s early days, give us time" defense from Microsoft. The defense is
partially true, but it gets weaker and weaker as the actual years of saying
that mount….

Hacking Google
To Help It Improve Security
Last Friday, Philipp Lenssen wrote a fascinating post describing how his
associate Tony Ruscoe was able to access Philipp’s Google account: "It’s your
worst nightmare – someone reads parts of your Google emails, views your docs,
modifies your spreadsheets, checks out your reading habits on the Google
personalized homepage or Google Reader, and goes through your search history."
Tony’s a white-hat hacker, so he reported his exploit to Google’s security
team, and they’ve now closed the hole that allowed this to happen. Today, Tony
explains what he did and how he thinks Google fixed the problem in Details of
Google’s…

Microsoft Live
& Yahoo Push For Firefox Users, Plus Revisiting The IE7 Search Battle
Today I noticed Live.com trying to get me to search with it in Firefox. Then
Yahoo did the same thing. So I guess a new round of "let’s change search
defaults" is going on within Firefox. That seemed a good excuse for a revisit
how the various search engines are trying to pull us as their default choices
in both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox….

Study Says Get
In Top 5 Not Top 10 & Search Engines May Need To Highlight Official Sites
On Friday, we reported briefly on a new eye tracking study from Microsoft on
how users interact with search results. I spent some time doing a deep dive
into the survey, which is full of interesting information. Among the findings
is that search marketers may need to be more concerned about getting into the
top five rather than the top ten, if they want to be seen. In addition, search
engines might want to seriously experiment more with adding "official site"
links at the top of their pages and possibly enlarge the size of listing
descriptions or "snippets" to help…

New Year’s
Resolution: Know Your Inbound Link Potential!
So what’s your linking strategy for 2007? I mean besides get as many as
possible? Maybe you’re adding link bait? Or buying links? Or ramping up your
link-loaded "press releases" to six per month? Buying old sites and 301’ing
them? Or maybe you want to get to the Digg homepage? Reciprocals? Three ways?
Ask your college kid for a link from his .edu page? Outsource it all? Or how
about this? Works for me. Whatever your linking strategy — and there are many
— one thing has not changed a bit in the 14 years I’ve been in the link…

Link Week: New
Column From Search Engine Land
I’d like to welcome Eric Ward who kicks off Link Week today, a regular weekly
column from Search Engine Land. Eric’s has been both building links as a
professional over the past 14 years and educating people about the space over
that time. We’re thrilled to have him writing for us. Link Week is the first
of several other columns that will be launching on Search Engine Land over the
coming weeks. I’ll provide an introduction for each one of them, as they
launch….